BY BRUCE JOHNSTONE, THE LEADER-POST MAY 25, 2009

Greenfield Carbon Offsetters Inc., the province's first carbon offset farm, is also hoping to build a new, green industry in Saskatchewan, which has plenty of carbon emissions and farmland and trees with which to offset them.

Kalen and Derrick Emsley, co-presidents of Greenfield and business students at the Paul J. Hill School of Business at the University of Regina, talked about building a green business in Saskatchewan while
still in high school. The idea is simple enough. Grow trees on land not suitable for crops. Sell the carbon credits from the trees to companies that need carbon offsets. Plant the trees, wait for a few years, then start raking in the money.

Of course, it's not that simple. First, you need access to land and equipment to plant the trees and manage the land. Then you need experienced planters to plant the trees. Fortunately, Kalen and Derrick's father, Doug Emsley, owns a company called Agricultural Development Corp., which buys Saskatchewan farmland, rents it out and sells partnership units in the fund to investors. "That's one of the great things about this business," said Derrick. "It's scalable to anything we want. We've got (access to) unlimited resources through our father's company, Agricultural Development Corp.

"The fact is we can always get more trees and more land," added Derrick. "There's no shortage of land in Saskatchewan. So really the sky's the limit for this project."

As for planters, Derrick, 19, and Kalen, 20, hand-planted most of the 25,000 trees Greenfield planted last year, the first year of the pilot project.